This review contains spoilers. Another existential threat lurked in the compact form of Mary-Ann Cotton, dubbed ‘Britain’s First Female Serial Killer’. Played here by Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt, Cotton is the subject of two-part drama Dark Angel, adapted from David Wilson’s biography of the prolific poisoner. Dark Angel does a solid job of establishing the wretchedness of life for Victorian working class women – if largely by having characters deliver lines like “Buck up, love eh? Cos that’s just how life is for women and no amount of mithering will change that.” A lack of birth control, high infant mortality, poor employment prospects and scant support from the state formed a perfect storm of dispiriting, exhausting poverty. We’re shown a heavily pregnant Mary-Ann endlessly on her knees scrubbing infested lodgings, pumping water from the communal source and struggling down smoggy alleyways laden with buckets and baskets. If you saw a way out of this mess, suggests Dark Angel, you might just take it too. That story is chronologically baffling. Choosing to forgo the clutter of date subtitles, viewers are left to deduce how much time has passed between scenes by counting the number of urchins clinging to Mary-Ann’s skirts (not a perfect system by any means due to the rate they pop their little clogs, whether due to mama’s helping hand or God’s plan). One scene she’s puffed up and pregnant, the next she’s trim-tummed and nursing, and the next she’s a beach ball standing over another tiny grave. She’s no sooner felt up by Jonas Armstrong’s lascivious cad in a filthy alleyway than she’s bouncing a new-born son on her knee. And for a drama that tries to paint a sympathetically pitiful picture of Victorian women’s lives, childbirth is entirely skipped over. One pregnant twinge at the sink cuts to Mary-Ann sat up cheerfully in a spic and span bed cuddling a bonny daughter as if she’d been painlessly removed from a Velcro-sealed pouch. Driven by dire circumstance to murder her first husband, Mary-Ann takes to killing with all the moral complexity of someone taking up bridge. Second hubby not bringing home sufficient bacon? A spoonful of arsenic makes the medicine go down. Mother acting suspicious about the speedy dispatch of husband number two? Get the kettle on, everything’ll look better after a nice cup of poison tea. By the end of part one, we’ve watched Cotton kill a handful of times, but still know hardly a thing about her, not least how she’s affected by the murders. Instead of getting under the skin of a killer, Dark Angel turns serial poisoning into a sketch show that doesn’t just lack seriousness, it’s actually silly. When Mary-Ann turns to her trusty teapot, a cheeky wink to camera wouldn’t feel at all out of place. Silly, yet thanks to the subject matter, bleak and so far offering no insight you won’t find on Cotton’s Wikipedia page. Dark Angel is a missed opportunity. Dark Angel concludes on Monday the 7th of November at 9pm on ITV1.
